I keep rereading this opening and it still has me confused. "Understatement" to me suggests that it is a true statement, but one that isn't as strong of a claim as could easily be made.
I read the original passage and he seems to be serious - that in his time, algorithms were so simple that errors could be ruled out once a confidence of 87.5-93.75% (loosely, 1 - 1/(2^3)-1/(2^4)) has been achieved. He wasn't being sarcastic, he was just wrong (for modern computing). So his statement is generally false and not an understatement.
Perhaps rather than "understatement" use "misstatement"? "Misstatement" works as an understated version of "dead wrong" so it would work in place: "is a misstatement, to say the least."
In Miscomputation: Learning to live with errors, you say that Charles Babbage's quote is an "understatement".
I keep rereading this opening and it still has me confused. "Understatement" to me suggests that it is a true statement, but one that isn't as strong of a claim as could easily be made.
I read the original passage and he seems to be serious - that in his time, algorithms were so simple that errors could be ruled out once a confidence of 87.5-93.75% (loosely, 1 - 1/(2^3)-1/(2^4)) has been achieved. He wasn't being sarcastic, he was just wrong (for modern computing). So his statement is generally false and not an understatement.
Perhaps rather than "understatement" use "misstatement"? "Misstatement" works as an understated version of "dead wrong" so it would work in place: "is a misstatement, to say the least."
OR maybe I'm misreading entirely?